A Missing C-Spine Link: Mind the Gap

Tan, Wu Meng; Ng, Quan Sing; Soh, Lay Tin

doi:10.1177/201010581102000110

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Speaking seven months after the parliamentary debates, he revealed that his government had been faced with intense resistance, if not outright opposition, to the Vandalism Act's mandatory corporal punishment from the government's own legal officers (Lee 1967). Lee's audience consisted primarily of private‐sector lawyers but included the state's elite legal actors—the chief justice, the High Court judiciary, the attorney general, and the speaker of Parliament (Tan 1967, xxxv). To this audience of Singapore's legal complex, Prime Minister Lee revealed that the attorney general, technically the highest‐ranking government legal officer in a Westminster system, had vigorously opposed the Vandalism Act:…”

Section: State Lawyers For Liberalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punishing Bodies, Securing the Nation: How Rule of Law Can Legitimate the Urbane Authoritarian State

Rajah¹

2011

Law soc. inq.

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Although authoritarian rule of law may seem an oxymoron, strategic reconfigurations of the “rule of law” can produce acceptance of law that observes procedure while erasing rights. By bringing into conjunction critical discourse theory and scholarship on the legal professions and political liberalism, this article shows how rulers can deploy rhetoric and legislation to produce derogations from the liberal content of rule of law while sustaining a state legitimacy built on claims to state realizations of rule of law. A close analysis of Singapore's Vandalism Act shows that silencing the critique of lawyers and constraining the power of judges has been crucial to a legitimation of the surveillance and criminalization of dissenters. The consolidation of state power effected via law and discourse might be seen as making the nation a notional panopticon—corporal punishment, even if conducted behind prison walls, becomes instructive public spectacle conveying the state's seeming omniscience and monopolistic command of law.

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Section: State Lawyers For Liberalismmentioning

confidence: 99%